Hungry Ghosts

by Stephen Blackmoore

  Bustillo says nothing, but I can hear footsteps nearby. I can feel him drawing power from the local pool of magic. It’s slow, a trickle. He’s hoping I won’t notice. That gives me an idea.

  Mages get their power from within and without. We have our own reserves, and we can tap into the ambient magic that infuses a place. Different places have more or less power. Some places are better for certain types of spells than others. And each place has a flavor, a scent to its magic given by its people, its history.

  New York tastes like hot metal and granite, San Francisco like hammered brass and filigree. Los Angeles is a twisty mess of cultures and flavors that changes from block to block. The magic here in Durango is wild, violent. Hot and sweet. A product of its history.

  “Because, you know, I’ve heard that before. Folks who figure if they can kill me they can take my place as Santa Muerte’s favorite. Better yet, if they can get hold of Mictlantecuhtli’s blade, they can take my skin, take my place as Santa Muerte’s pet. That’s why you were really waiting for me, isn’t it? Wanted some uninterrupted quality time to take my skin?”

  When mages draw power from the pool, they’re doing it because their own power isn’t sufficient to do what they want. That’s a plus and a minus. On the one hand, yay, more power.

  On the other hand, we’re all drawing from the same, constantly replenishing pool around us. But it doesn’t replenish quickly and there’s only so much of it at a time. Right now, Bustillo is using a drinking straw to suck on a lake. And as long as the power is there, he can keep pulling it in, building it up. Use it for whatever big spell he thinks will take me down.

  “You know, a guy tried to do that to me a while ago,” I say. “Carve me up like a chicken and wear me like a suit. I stuck a bomb in his eyeball and blew his head up. The hell of it is, that didn’t kill him.”

  “You don’t deserve it,” he says.

  “Damn right I don’t deserve it. Nobody fucking deserves it. I’m in the middle of a cosmic threesome I didn’t want to have and I’m the one getting fucked.”

  “So give it to me,” he says. “You want to get rid of it. I want to take it.”

  “Dude, you have no idea what you’re asking,” I say. “Believe me when I tell you, if I could give it to you, I’d wrap it up in a bow and hand it to you. You think this is going to put you at the right hand of God. It won’t. It would just put you under her thumb.”

  Since becoming tied to Santa Muerte my abilities have amplified. Spells I couldn’t do without days of preparation and hours of ritual I can pop off with a thought. I’ve always been able to draw a lot of power, but now I can pull it in like a firehose.

  I’ve also got access to Mictlantecuhtli’s power, so casting is easier, but it comes with one hell of a big string attached. Every time I tap into it more of me turns to jade. Casting spells has become a delicate balance of making sure any energy I’m using is mine and mine alone. I touch his power and another chunk of my body turns green. So far it’s mostly hidden under my clothes, but it’s spreading.

  So I’ve been really careful about what magic I’m using and how big a spell I’m casting. Casting something powerful just fucks me more. But pulling in power from the local pool? Well, that’s just charging up the batteries. Doesn’t mean I have to use it on a spell.

  And that’s what I do. I open the taps and power floods into me. Not because I need it, not because I particularly want it.

  But sucking it all in keeps it away from Bustillo. The pool drains like it’s burst a pipe. I can feel him grasping for it, desperately trying to hang onto whatever bits he can grab hold of. But it’s mine. I’ve got it all.

  Magical cock-block.

  My defensive spells are inked into my skin, not an unusual thing for a lot of mages, but the sheer volume of my tattoos is. I make the illustrated man look like a yoga mom with a tramp stamp. I’ve stored power into my tats, so if I run out of my own juice, or I can’t get anything from the local pool, they’re still going to work. Even the jade hasn’t affected them. They just look like they’re etched into the stone.

  They’ve saved my life a time or two. From the sudden flare up and darkening of magic I’m sensing from Bustillo, it looks like his spells are drawing on his own power and the pool to keep running.

  He can’t get anything from the pool, so he’s going to draw on his own to build the spell. Only he doesn’t have enough to do it.

  I stand and gesture toward the desk with a spell. Nothing big, nothing showy. More importantly, nothing that takes too much juice. I can feel Mictlantecuhtli’s power inside me perk up, but I shove it back down. It’s tempting to use it. It wants to be used.

  But aside from the fact that it’ll just fuck me up faster it’d also be like using a flamethrower to take out a mosquito. God power is overkill. And much as I like the idea of Bustillo as a red smear across the floor, it’s a bit much even for me.

  I make the desk slide across the room and crash into the wall. Bustillo and I face each other. I’ve got the knife in one hand, the Browning in the other pointed at his head. He holds his empty submachine gun in his shaking hands.

  “You’ve lost, Manuel. Or do you want to try throwing the gun at me?”

  He lets it slip from his fingers. Must be strange for him. I wonder if he’s ever felt really afraid in his life. Like he couldn’t just magic his way out of a bind.

  Magic can give a guy a level of wealth and privilege that even a normal can’t touch. Sure, some guy can build a massive financial empire, but I can think of half a dozen ritual spells that can make it all go away.

  Magic’s not about money, it’s about power, it’s about knowledge. We’re special. Top of the food chain. The one percent of the one percent of the one percent. Lots of shit in this world just can’t touch us. Lot of mages get to live in their ivory towers and no matter how much shit they walk through they don’t even get so much as a stain on their shoes.

  I’m betting Bustillo’s like that. Probably figured out his power as a kid, honed it as best he could, maybe picked up some pointers from another mage. Bit by bit he grew until he had all the power he wanted.

  Oh, sure he could be running a cartel, but why? Big pain in the ass, that. Mages who think on that scale are fucking dangerous, don’t get me wrong, but unless they’re playing some other angle, they tend not to be big thinkers. Why run a multi-billion, worldwide, criminal enterprise when you can spend your time prying out the secrets of the gods instead and still eat filet mignon every night?

  Yeah. Bustillo’s that kind of guy. I can see it in his eyes. I’ve seen that fear before. I’ve felt that fear before. If I were a better man I’d just kill him. He knows that’s where this is headed. But I’m tired and I’m pissed off and I don’t much like him. So instead I feed that fear.

  “I could carve you up, Manuel.” I trace the air with the knife like I’m filleting a steak. “Slice your skin from your bones with Mictlantecuhtli’s blade and put it on like I’m putting on a jacket. I could take you with me. Everything you are, everything you have would live on after a fashion. It’s maybe not immortality, but something of you will survive in me. Would you like that?”

  Bustillo, eyes wide and body quaking from fear. I’ve cut him off from the pool, and his own power is next to nothing now. He’s used it all up. I’m still drawing power from the pool, pulling it down faster than it can fill back up. There’s nothing there for him.

  “Or I can shoot you. Got a round in the chamber with your name on it. Well? I asked you a question, Manuel. What’ll it be? Do you want to live on? Or do you want to die?”

  “Live,” he says. “I want to live.”

  The fear has taken him and I bet if I told him to beg for it, he’d do exactly that. It’s not just that he’s afraid to die, though he’s sure as hell that. It’s that he’s run up against the limits of his own power and arrogance. That’s broken him more than anything else possibly could.

  “Too bad,” I say and pull the trigger.

&nb
sp; I pull my car, a ’73 Cadillac Eldorado convertible, out from where I’ve hidden it half a mile away from Bustillo’s compound. I got it off a whackjob necromancer who was kidnapping Voodoo Loa and stitching them into his soul. I took him down in a bar in Texas and took the Eldorado for my trouble.

  I drive down the rocky hill from Bustillo’s compound toward Tepehuanes, the throaty rumble of the Cadillac’s V-8 echoing through the darkness. The Caddy’s been unintentionally mothballed for about a year and it feels it. Even with new pads and rotors the brakes aren’t great, the engine sounds like it needs another tune-up and the rag-top is so thin you can see light through it.

  I had to abandon the car on a dock in San Pedro when I took it over to the land of the dead and didn’t have enough magic to bring it back. Kind of like if you do valet parking and you lose your stub.

  I was being chased by a fire elemental at the time and had my ex-girlfriend and a burnt-out hobo of a mage in the car with me. It was kind of a stressful day.

  The other side of the veil is pure entropy. Life drains away, magic leeches off into the fabric of the place. So by the time I got the car from the other side and off the dock the gas in the tank was as combustible as water, the metal was starting to pit, the rag top was falling apart and the tires were about ready to turn into dust.

  The only thing holding it together was some residual magic left over from wards that were inscribed into it by the previous owner. At least those kept the inside of the thing in one piece. A little work and it was, well, not good as new, but better than it was.

  Normally I don’t much care about cars. I need a ride, I steal one. But I’ve got a soft spot for the Eldorado. When everything else was going to shit the car worked even when it shouldn’t have. It’s built like a tank, steers like a goddamn cow, but it’s saved my life a couple of times.

  I only had the Cadillac a short while before I lost it on the dead side, but having it back here feels right. It’s reliable, a trusted friend. I figure on this trip I can use all the friends I can get.

  I pull off Bustillo’s dirt road and onto Highway 23 on the south side of town. In the distance I can see the burning warehouse casting a shifting red and yellow glow into the night sky. I pass a Pemex, the bright fluorescent lights of the gas station stark against the unlit highway and see the pickup trucks with Bustillo’s men, their faces blackened with soot. There are definitely fewer returning than left.

  I had hoped to not see them at all when I walked out of Bustillo’s place. The Caddy stands out no matter where it is, but at midnight on a darkened road in Durango after their drug warehouse burned down? Just wait until they get back to their boss’s place. I want to be long gone before that happens.

  I check a map I picked up in Puerto Peñasco, when I realized I didn’t know where the fuck I was going, and find Mexico City. I do some quick math. It’s about a twelve-hour straight shot. Even with Adderall, which I’ve been popping like Tic Tacs for the last month, I won’t make it. I haven’t slept in three days. I need a shower. I need a place to hole up and figure out my next move. Zacatecas looks like a decent place for it. Hell, they even have a Walmart.

  Zacatecas is only about three hours away. I can do that easily enough. I’m still buzzing on adrenaline from my fight with Bustillo and from the Adderall I took a few hours before.

  When I started trading places with Mictlantecuhtli he appeared to me and laid it all out. He’s trapped in a tomb in Mictlan, resting, being alone with his thoughts. According to him he likes it that way. He doesn’t want to rise again. Told me that it was all Santa Muerte’s idea. Their kingdom, Mictlan, needs a king and a queen and, self-esteem and arrogance notwithstanding, I don’t fit the bill.

  She wants to bring Mictlantecuhtli back and I’m the sacrificial lamb. The only way out, he tells me, is to kill her. Without her I become just some run of the mill, old and boring necromancer. Mictlantecuhtli’s obsidian blade is the way to do it.

  Only Mictlantecuhtli put a little extra bite into the knife and made it so it wouldn’t just kill people and let you take their skins, it would kill gods, too. Why? Fuck if I know. At a guess I’d say he was thinking he might need to use it on the other gods.

  And then there’s his wife’s side of the story.

  Santa Muerte didn’t deny what was happening to me. That I was slowly turning to jade, that I was going to take his place as a piece of statuary if I didn’t do something about it. She knew it was going to happen when I took her deal. She tells me the same thing he tells me about Mictlan. It needs a king and a queen. Two halves to make it whole.

  But, and this is where the stories diverge, she wants me to be that king. She wants me to be by her side in Mictlan. Mictlantecuhtli is old news. There’s bad blood there. But in order to take his place I need to be more than just her husband. I need to break this bond Mictlantecuhtli and I have and take his place at her side. The only way to do that, she tells me, is to kill him once and for all. No sleeping in stone beneath Mictlan. He needs to be dead dead.

  And this is where their stories reconnect, because to kill him, like her, I need to use the obsidian blade. I’m stuck between two Aztec death icons in a domestic squabble. One’s telling me one thing, the other’s telling me another. To complicate things they both deny that they arranged to get the blade into my hands. One of them has to be lying.

  I’ve seen meth-head marriages that were less dysfunctional.

  If Santa Muerte is telling me the truth the only way to save myself is to kill Mictlantecuhtli. If Mictlantecuhtli is telling me the truth, my only way out is to kill her. I’m being played, but I’m not sure which one is playing me.

  So I’m going for Option C, which, let me tell ya, I’m a big fan of. Kill them both.

  What I don’t know what to do with is Tabitha. When I saw her last she showed me that she was Santa Muerte, but I’ve been wondering if that’s true ever since. The story is that she died years ago and had a piece of Santa Muerte’s soul inserted to bring her back.

  If she’s just an extension of Santa Muerte then she’s just as responsible for killing my sister as Santa Muerte herself. She’s just a limb of Santa Muerte and killing her won’t be any different from pruning a tree.

  But what if she’s not? What if she’s just Tabitha Cheung with a piece of a death goddess in her head? What if she got stuck with Santa Muerte the same way I’m stuck with Mictlantecuhtli? Some things she said have me thinking things might be more complicated. But part of me wonders if maybe I just don’t want it to be simple.

  Either way I need to find her. I probably need to kill her. But before I do that I want to be really goddamn sure.

  ___

  I’ve got one eye on the road ahead of me, the yellow lines of the highway zipping out of the darkness, and one eye on the rearview mirror. The road stretches ahead of me, dark blue beneath a thin slice of moon. No other cars on the road. At some point Bustillo’s men will discover that he’s dead and either a) celebrate and choose a new leader like drunken buccaneers or, much more likely because this isn’t Pirates of the Caribbean, b) hit the road and come gunning for me.

  They saw my car pass the gas station. At least some of them will remember it. And they’ll realize that there’s only one road out of Tepehuanes, and it’s the only one I could be on. They’re a bunch of murdering thugs, not idiots.

  Whether they come after me really depends on how pissed off they are. I’m in contested territory, now. From what I understand Los Zetas and Cártel del Golfo are fighting for dominance over this particular patch of dirt. But the players in this game change depending on who’s got the bigger budget, so fuck knows who’s really running things. The only sure bet is it’s not the government no matter how many soldiers they send down here.

  This highway is a main thoroughfare for transporting marijuana and heroin up to the border. Bustillo was working for the Sinaloa Cartel. The Zetas and CDG might not take it too kindly if they find his men down here. Or they might help them shoot me. Could go eithe
r way.

  Behind me I can see headlights, cars rumbling down the road. Only they don’t look like those trucks I saw in the gas station. They’re too big, too wide. They’ve got lights on the roofs. Police? No. A military convoy.

  Doesn’t mean it’s not Bustillo’s men, of course. Whether they have any particular loyalty for the man doesn’t matter. They’re sure as hell going to have loyalty to Sinaloa. The guy who brings in my head is looking at a promotion.

  That’s, well, not worst case, but close enough to. It could be one of the other cartels, or actual soldiers or police working for them. A lot of the cartels have gotten their hands on some heavy hardware, and they’ve managed to buy a fair number of cops and politicians.

  I could gun the engine, but where the hell am I gonna go? It’s a straight shot down to Zacatecas and the next turn off isn’t for another fifty miles. Better to meet them here in the open, where I have more options, than have them run me off the road.

  I pull over to see if they’ll pass, the engine still running. The convoy’s a good twelve or thirteen cars long. Trucks, APCs, a goddamn tank. They’re not cartel, they’re army. Or if they are cartel, this country’s more fucked up than I thought.

  Behind me one of the trucks pulls over and stops. A soldier jumps out of the back with a flashlight and an assault rifle. I make sure the Browning’s good to go and hide it behind the door. I scribble “CONFÍA EN MÍ” onto one of my stickers and slap it on my chest. “Trust me.”

  I roll down the window. The soldier’s young, early twenties maybe. Crew cut hair, earnest face. Nervous. If I was him I would be, too. With the bullshit going on between Los Zetas and Cártel del Golfo out here, some random guy on an empty stretch of road in the middle of nowhere is nothing but trouble. Any stop could end with him dead. It has for some of his fellow soldiers. Their ghosts cluster in so close they might as well be hanging off him like Christmas ornaments. Dead soldiers, dead civilians. So many dead. Did he kill them? Or was he just there when it happened?